


The Third Degree

by audreycritter



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Flashbacks, Gen, He's also sad, Robin!Dick era, bruce believes in people finding redemption, bruce wayne is trying to be a good friend, but he's asleep, descriptions of violence, i believe in harvey dent, minor hurt/comfort, other people not so much, tw: burns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 04:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13967652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Once upon a time, Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent were friends.Then a lot changed, including Harvey himself, and maybe even Bruce.But when Harvey shows up at four in the morning, Bruce decides to let him inside the Manor, no matter how ill-advised some might think it, because there's one thing that hasn't changed: Bruce still believes in Harvey Dent.





	The Third Degree

**Author's Note:**

> slight warning: this is angst that only incrementally improves. it's not especially horrific or chaotic, but if you don't like simply bitter endings, this might not be for you.

The snow is falling hard and carried on howling winds when Bruce finally climbs the stairs from the cave, limping as he goes. There’s a burn on his thigh like a firework, around a track of torn flesh, from a gun that went off way too close. His ears haven’t stopped ringing yet, the lingering rotary-phone whine of tinnitus a faint buzz in the background. Thankfully, the pins and needles feeling in his fingers had subsided to just a general chill by the time Alfred finished treating and wrapping his leg.

It’s four in the morning and far too late. The city was a gritty pile of slush on every street, a cacophony of car wrecks and stranded people, and a half-dozen trails to follow beside that. Arkham’s doors have been revolving faster than usual, lately.

Yawning, he limps through the house toward bed. He’s too tired to eat and Alfred had gone ahead of him, telegraphing his own exhaustion and the end of his working day with lights dimmed or off in all his usual haunts.

He ducks his head into Dick’s room, satisfied when he spots the boy sleeping in a tangle of blankets and snoring softly.

“B?” Dick’s snoring cuts off and the boy lifts his head, still sleepy and slow. He’d not been happy Bruce went out without him, but because it was a school night, the Arkham villains out, and the weather…Bruce didn’t think saying anything  _but_  “no” was even an option.

“I’m back,” Bruce says. “Get some more sleep, Dick.”

“M’kay,” Dick mumbles, already mostly out again.

Bruce’s hand is on the door knob to his room when the perimeter alarm beeps softly from a corner. He freezes and waits. It beeps again. It’s only concern, and his immediate alertness, that keeps him from sighing in frustration. He backtracks down the stairs to the small wall of security feeds in a closet off a back hallway. This is where he keeps the slightly modified regularly-marketed stuff, the kind that anyone could have.

Every camera is showing undisturbed, snowy landscape except one. There’s a figure huddled at the main gate, leaning against the wall. Bruce frowns and peers more closely, recognizing something familiar in the form’s shape. While he watches, the man lifts his hand to the intercom buzzer and hesitates. He retracts his hand slowly and rubs furiously at one side of his face.

That’s when Bruce recognizes him.

It’s Harvey.

His coat looks far too thin for the weather and he isn’t wearing gloves or a hat. On the monitor, he raises his finger to the buzzer and hesitates a second time.

“Oh, you’re awake,” Alfred says from behind him. Bruce turns for a second to see the older man in a dressing gown tied at the waist. He raises an eyebrow at Bruce’s apparent calm. “It’s rather early for a social call. Was it a false alarm?”

“Harvey,” Bruce says, looking back at the screen. The figure there slumps down another foot, sliding in the snow.

“Mr. Dent?” Alfred asks, joining Bruce next to the monitor. “Shall I ring the police?”

“No,” Bruce crosses his arms and watches, considering. Alfred is already reaching for the phone attached to the wall and he freezes.

“You can’t be serious,” he says, words ringing with sharp incredulity.

“I’m not going to let him freeze to death, if that’s what you’re asking,” Bruce says, even though he knows it isn’t.

“You’re utterly serious. You mean to let him in the house.” Alfred’s displeasure is so evident that Bruce doesn’t have to glance at him to know exactly what expression is on his face. “I’ll tell you now I won’t serve coffee.”

“Go back to bed, Al,” Bruce says. He doesn’t think if they had an hour to discuss it that they’d ever see eye to eye on this. “I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” Alfred says sharply. “I’ll be sitting awake with the shotgun for the first sign of trouble. You’ve the young Master Richard to think about, I’ll trouble you to remember.”

That does, briefly, give Bruce pause. But he shakes his head.

“I can take care of it,” he says, absently watching the figure now sitting in the snow. His chest twists in an odd way, a tightening of his ribs. “I wouldn’t let him in if I didn’t think I could.”

Alfred harrumphs and leaves, muttering to himself about idiots with soft hearts, something he intends for Bruce to overhear. Bruce tunes it out.

He presses the audio channel button for the gate.

“Harvey,” he says, leaning toward the mic. On the screen, the man staggers slowly to his feet and this time there’s no hesitation in jabbing the button to open the channel.

“Bruce?” The hoarseness of the syllable isn’t muted by the speakers. “It’s three in the morning.”

“Four, actually. You set off the perimeter alarm. What’s going on?”

“I…uh.” Harvey drops his head against the gate. “I’m having a bad night. Needed a place…and I thought…”

“Stay right there. I’ll be down in a minute.”

“I knew I could count on you, Bruce.”

Five minutes later, he’s to the end of the snowy drive in one of the nondescript SUVs from the garage, the heat cranked as high as it will go. The gate swings open and Harvey is standing there, swaying, in a torn up suit. The side of his face capable of expression looks haggard.

Bruce reaches across and shoves the passenger door open, swallowing his wince at the last second when the motion pulls painfully on the wound in his thigh.

“Come on. It’s cold.”

He stumbles once in the snow on the way there, but then Harvey Dent climbs into the car and holds his hands out to the air vent. He coughs without covering his mouth and sags listlessly in the seat.

“How’d you get out here?” Bruce asks, scanning the road in either direction.

“Stole a car. Wrecked it, a mile back, by the entrance sign to that Hickory Heaven or whatever that fucking neighborhood is called.”

“Haven,” Bruce supplies, turning the car back toward the house. He returns up the drive, avoiding the previous tracks.

“Yeah, that’s the one. So damn pretentious. Woulda loved a place there once.” Harvey sighs. “Thanks for the…lift. How long do you think I’ve got before the cops?”

Harvey’s always been eloquent, more than Bruce by a longshot, and he’s perfected that casual good buddy manner of speech that won so many over, back before. He hasn’t lost it, even if his voice now sounds faintly of the scratch of sandpaper scraping every word.

“I haven’t called them,” Bruce says. “Thought I’d give you a chance to catch your breath.”

“Oh,” Harvey says. “Oh. Well, that’s…damn, Bruce, that’s…”

“Don’t say stupid and make me regret it,” Bruce warns, looking sidelong. He softens it with a bit of a crooked grin. It’s easier than it should be, to fall back into old patterns with Harvey. Harvey was one of those men who made it so easy to be his friend and even now he exudes warm charm. He knows from reading court transcripts that others find it off-putting, and he’s thought for years that it’s bitterly ironic that it’s one way Harvey hasn’t changed— just how people perceive him shifted. Bruce isn’t so naive to think Harvey’s free of responsibility there, but it stings all the same.

“Heh,” Harvey says, looking at his hands. “You know I broke out last week.”

“I heard,” Bruce says. He’d been watching for him, actually, waiting for him to resurface, but none of Two-Face’s usual lackeys had displayed any suspicious activity.

“Haven’t really…done anything,” Harvey says, looking out the window at the Manor grounds. He seems distracted. “Just wanted some air.”

They pull into the garage and Bruce shuts off the engine. “I’m going to have to call them, Harv.”

“I know, I know,” Harvey says. “I don’t do so well out here anymore.”

Getting out of the car is a good opportunity to brace himself for a second on the hood, to suck in air and hide the burn in his leg and the sting of that statement. On the other side of the car, Harvey gets out and takes a step and then stops to sway dangerously.

Bruce slips Harvey’s arm around his neck as soon as he makes it to his side. “But first, you need to get warmed up, and maybe some sleep.”

“You’ve always been…a good…such a good friend,” Harvey says, slurring a little as he leans. “Wish things had been different.”

“Me too, Harv.” The pain in his leg spikes upward now that he’s putting more weight on it, but he’s distracted by Harvey’s arm around his neck. “Jesus, Harvey. You’re freezing.”

“Was snowing, you idiot,” Harvey says, with a broken chuckle. “Never have understood how you manage that big company.”

“I’ve got everyone fooled, I guess,” Bruce says casually, nudging the door open with his foot.

“You’ve just got a knack for it, that’s all. No common sense though. S’why you need Alfred. Where is he, anyway?”

“Out of town,” Bruce lies, as they pass through the kitchen and go toward the study. “Long overdue vacation.”

Harvey looks around while they stand in the hall and Bruce turns the knob for the study door. “Didn’t you get a kid or something? I think I read about it.”

“Hm,” Bruce says neutrally, ashamed of the prick of fear in his chest. “It’s late. He’s asleep.” Silently, he begs Dick to stay that way and also wishes an apology in Alfred’s direction for dismissing his concerns so easily. But he shoves it down; Harvey’s in bad shape, no goons, no weapons. He hasn’t even seen the coin since he picked him up.

“Yeah,” Harvey says. “I’ve heard they need that. How is he?”

Maybe to someone else it would feel like prying, but Harvey’s sinking into the couch with a forlorn glint in his good eye, and Bruce thinks he just wants to feel normal, to ask normal questions.

He crouches and begins untying Harvey’s soaked dress shoes.

“He’s great,” he says. “He’s a good kid. Better than I ever was, especially after…”

Bruce trails off and throws the shoes to the side of the couch. When he looks up at Harvey, the other man’s face is twisted in something like stricken horror.

“He wasn’t…it wasn’t from one of my…”

“No,” Bruce says softly. “It wasn’t because of you, Harv.” He stands and digs around in the ottoman, trying to keep it from being obvious that he’s favoring his leg. “You want a shower? Or just a blanket?”

“Could I?” Harvey asks, suddenly. “A hot shower?”

“I’ve got more bathrooms than I know what to do with,” Bruce replies. “Come on, I’ll find you a towel.”

Thirty minutes later, they’re back in the study. Bruce spent ten of it wrestling with the too-complicated coffee maker, and true to his word, Alfred did not materialize to help. He spent the other twenty gathering supplies and making sure the emergency knockout gas was in the desk, and wondering if he’d be able to help Harvey as much if he ever hurt Dick. It makes him a little less bitter at Alfred’s refusal, considering how many scars have come between him and Harvey.

Harvey is in a pair of borrowed sweats, wrapped in a blanket, when Bruce sits on the coffee table across from him.

“You haven’t been taking care of it,” he says, studying the fissures in the burned skin. “That’s gotta hurt.”

“Like hell,” Harvey says, scratching at it. “I don’t care, most days.”

Bruce unscrews the cap from a lotion compound with hydrocortisone. “May I?”

“Aw, Bruce, you don’t have to…” Harvey says, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders. “I don’t even like you looking at it.”

“I went to med school,” Bruce reminds him. “I think I can handle it.”

“Yeah, you dropped out,” Harvey laughs. “Do whatever the fuck you want, Bruce. I’m tired of making decisions.”

“Where is it?” Bruce asks, moving to the couch. The coin is such an obvious absence these days that he doesn’t need to specify.

“Buried under two tons of twisted metal,” Harvey says. “Tried to find it, but no luck.”

They fall silent when Bruce begins rubbing lotion onto the damaged remnants of Harvey’s face, except for a strangled kind of noise in the back of Harvey’s throat that stills Bruce’s hands.

“Alright?” he asks.

“Mhmm,” Harvey says, his good eye shut. “Just…not used to it.”

Neither of them speak again until Bruce is recapping the container and wiping his hands on a towel. He shakes ibuprofen out of a bottle and offers them.

“Hungry? It won’t be anything fancy, but I can warm something up.”

“Nah,” Harvey says, slumping down further into the couch. “Too tired.”

Bruce glances toward the south window and then draws the curtain more tightly shut. “It’s almost dawn. I can give you one of the guest rooms.”

In answer, there’s a snore from the couch.

He picks up one of the mugs of coffee and sits at the desk, resigning himself to no sleep for the night. It won’t be the hardest all-nighter he’s pulled, and despite himself he really can’t convince his own head that falling asleep with Harvey Dent in the house would be anything approaching a good decision. Harvey has seemed lucid since he picked him up, but Bruce knows how quickly that can change.

A few times over the next few hours he drifts, lost in jumbled nearly-feverish thoughts about life five years before, when he would have said Harvey was one of his best friends. He hadn’t had— doesn’t have— many. For a single moment in which he is on the verge of hazy sleep before jerking himself back to awareness, he has the wild wish to properly introduce Dick. Then, he is awake again, and left with a dull ache in the aftermath.

He doesn’t drift close to sleep again after that.

The sun rises and he keeps an eye on the clock. When it's likely that Alfred must have roused Dick and taken him to school without the usual interruption for farewell, then he stands and risks leaving Harvey alone again to find breakfast and make certain.

The house is as empty as he anticipated. There are two plates of food in the warming drawer in the kitchen, with a pinned note about taking Dick to school and where the pepper spray is hidden in the foyer. The food itself is the closest thing Bruce is likely to get as an apology or a peace offering, and he can’t find it in himself to be angry about that. He’s surprised Alfred even went that far. He knows it wasn’t for Harvey.

In the solitude of the kitchen, he takes a moment to check his own leg and hiss at the reddened skin. It stings in sympathy for Harvey’s face and he can hear screaming, smell acrid melting flesh. He’s lost in a room full of smoke and charred bodies, writhing in futile attempts to escape agony seared into bones, and still there’s  _screaming_ —

The bomb had gone off and taken half the old building down with it. His cape is hot on his shoulders, smoldering with heat while it protects him from open burns. There are too many to pull to safety, and the pulling itself will kill some of them, and Harvey is in there somewhere….or he’d been in something like this…there are too many, there are  _always_  too many and every one of them is worth going back in for, until the other half collapses and the rubble…

Bruce blinks and he’s in the sunlit kitchen, breathing hard, palms braced against the counter. He turns to the sink and runs the water icy cold to catch it in his cupped hands and wash the beaded sweat off his face. His breath is under control by the time he scrubs his forehead and neck dry with a clean towel and tosses it into a bin tucked inside a cabinet.

The plates. He can manage food. He carries them back to the study with his thumb tucked around forks, and nudges the study door open.

He expects Harvey to be gone, but he’s still snoring on the couch. He leaves the plates on the desk to shake his shoulder gently.

“Harv,” he says, when the other man startles with a furious scowl. It takes a second, another, longer than it should for it to fade away.

“Bruce,” he says, laced with hostile bitterness. “Need to clean up?”

“Breakfast,” Bruce answers, gesturing with a shrug of one shoulder to the plates. The exhaustion must be muddling his head because he almost throws in that Alfred made the crostata, as assurance of the quality, before he remembers he’d said Alfred was out of town. “Just warmed stuff up. At least eat, first.”

“Whatever it is, it’s better than Arkham’s,” Harvey says, sitting up and letting the blanket fall off his back. His frown is still deep, even after he rubs sleep away from the uninjured side of his face.

They fall into silence again as they eat. Bruce barely tastes the baked fruit or the crumbed crust. Flickers of earlier nightmares turned real keep sparking in his mind, and he wishes he could find the thing to say to Harvey to convince him it’s not too late to change.

But words like those are fantasies. Stumbling on the right combination is nothing more than an impossible dream. He has to hope the offer of shelter alone will make a difference.

“Impossible” hasn’t often stopped him before, though.

“Harv,” he says, swirling coffee in his mug so Harvey doesn’t feel  _examined_  by Bruce’s steady gaze. “How are you? How’ve you been?”

“Why the hell would you care?” Harvey snarls, so fiery and raw that Bruce’s hand holding the mug stills. He tenses automatically, ready to fight if he needs to get to that drawer on the desk. The calmer Harvey of last night, the one who was almost his old friend, has vanished.

Their eyes meet, Bruce’s trying to discern how quickly he should move, and Harvey’s fury dissolves. He slumps forward, setting the half-finished plate on the floor before putting his hands over his face— both sides, marred and unmarred. His fingers press hard into the skin.

“Dammit, Bruce, I’m sorry…you don’t…nobody else would put up with me like this anymore, not anyone else I used to know. I think those friendships closed the second the checkbooks did. I don’t know how I’m doing. I broke out, didn’t I?”

“Anytime you need me, just call. Don’t wait until you wreck a car next time,” Bruce says, closing his fingers gently around Harvey’s wrists and tugging his hands back before the nails can damage his skin anymore. “You know I’ll be there.”

“I don’t know why,” Harvey says, looking the other way. “God, aren’t we fucked up.”

Bruce consciously decides not to make that a point of argument.

“I haven’t given up on you,” he says, his brow furrowing a little. Forget having the right formula of words to say, he wishes he could flip the switch that would make Harvey  _believe_  it, the way Bruce himself does, and always has.

“I wish you would,” Harvey says hollowly. “It’d be easier.”

“When’ve I ever backed down from a challenge?” Bruce asks, with a smile to cushion it. That pulls Harvey’s head back around and the sudden stage grin somehow matches the bared teeth of his scars in a way that makes his whole face look less grotesque, instead of more.

“Didn’t say you were smart,” Harvey counters, with a dry chuckle, and Bruce laughs even though there’s a panic beating in his chest, a knot of intuition in his stomach. He feels like he’s lost him, right there, when the politician’s mask went back up to cover whatever darker thoughts were milling around. He swears internally for picking that moment to attempt to cheer him by joking around, the way they used to— that’s never been  _his_  forte, not for relationships that matter.

“Never claimed I was,” he says, trying to plot out how he can backtrack.

“Say, do you mind if I take another shower, you know, before you…call?” Harvey asks. “I’ve missed water pressure. Or hot water, for that matter.”

“Sure,” Bruce says, and it knows it’s over. It’s like making the wrong move in a chess game and seeing it the second his fingers lift from the piece, surrendering his turn. Every move after that is already there in his head, before it happens, because some things just fall into place after moves like that, no matter who’s winning or losing.

It plays out exactly the way he sees it in his mind.

“I’ll grab a clean towel,” Bruce says, clasping Harvey’s shoulder first. “And I mean it. You can always call.”

“Yeah,” Harvey says, like it’s something he isn’t sure he likes the taste of on his tongue.

Bruce gets another towel. He doesn’t call the police, like he knows Harvey thinks he will.

When he gets back to the study, Harvey is gone. So is the cash from Bruce’s wallet on the desk, the keys to the Mercedes SUV, the Mercedes SUV itself. Tire tracks stand out on the fresh snow, slipping once with speed and slickness on the second curve in the drive from the Manor.

Sometime in the next two or three nights, Batman will take Two-Face back to Arkham Asylum under a flurry of curses and spit-flecked rage.

It’s ten in the morning and Bruce Wayne limps up the stairs, his leg throbbing, and falls into bed where he should sleep immediately, because he’s exhausted.

Instead, he stares at the ceiling and tries not to see it devoured by smoke, and ash, and fire.


End file.
